Efficient and Accurate Vehicle Localization Based on LiDAR Place Recognition

An efficient and accurate LiDAR place recognition methodology is proposed for vehicle localization. First, the Iris-LOAM is proposed to overcome the disadvantages of low accuracy of loop-closure detection and low efficiency of map construction in the existing LOAM-series methods. The method integrates the LiDAR-Iris global descriptor and Normal Distribution Transform (NDT) registration method into the loop-closure detection module of LiDAR Odometry and Mapping (LOAM), thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of map construction. For the shortcomings of low map loading and matching efficiency, the Random Sample Consensus method is used to remove the ground point cloud information. The Voxel Grid method is used to down sample the loaded map. Finally, the NDT method is adopted for point cloud map matching to obtain the position information. Show that the Iris-LOAM has higher efficiency than the SC-LeGO-LOAM. The average time of point cloud map matching is reduced by 39.5%. The place recognition can be executed to achieve accuracy vehicle localization.